Graphic Novel 'Feeding Ghosts' Pulitzer-Winning Yet Overlooked

The graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) by Tessa Hulls has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, with the announcement made on May 5.

Feeding Ghosts becomes only the second graphic novel to ever receive a Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992. While Maus was honored with a Special Award, Feeding Ghosts triumphed in the standard Memoir or Autobiography category, competing directly against the finest English-language prose works. Remarkably, this is Hulls’ debut graphic novel.

Feeding Ghosts is the second graphic novel to ever win the Pulitzer, the first being Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992.“

Recognized as the most prestigious honor in American journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize is internationally second only to the Nobel Prize.

This is a landmark achievement and arguably the most significant news in the comics industry. Surprisingly, however, it has received minimal media coverage. In the two weeks since the award, only a few mainstream and trade publications—notably the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly—and just one major comic news outlet, Comics Beat, have reported on it.

The Pulitzer Prize Board described the book, which Hulls says took nearly a decade to complete, as “An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”

Feeding Ghosts follows the echoes of modern Chinese history through three generations. Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist caught in the upheaval of the Communist victory in 1949. After escaping to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, but later experienced a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

This may, however, be Hulls' first and last graphic novel.“

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls witnessed her mother and grandmother grappling with the burden of unaddressed trauma and mental illness. In response, she left home to travel to the world's most remote regions. Ultimately, she returned to confront her own fears and inherited trauma, a haunting that could only be resolved through familial love.

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this,” Hulls explained in an interview last month. “My book is titled Feeding Ghosts because it represents the start of this nine-year journey to fulfill what I saw as a family duty.”

Despite its success, this may be Hulls' final graphic novel. “I discovered that the work of a graphic novelist is too isolating for my temperament,” she noted in another interview. “My creative process depends on engaging with the world and responding to what I encounter.” On her website, she states she is “setting out to become an embedded comics journalist working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits working in remote environments.”

Whatever path this trailblazing artist chooses next, Feeding Ghosts warrants recognition and celebration, both within the comics community and beyond.